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Indonesian president reaffirms 7 pct GDP growth target

Newly-elected Indonesian President Joko Widodo, known as Jokowi, on Wednesday reaffirmed his target to expand the country's economic growth rate to above 7 percent within 3 years.

One of his main steps is to cut a huge oil subsidy at the end of this year that he would have more funds to build roads, bridges, sea ports and airports, railway and other infrastructure facilities in the vast archipelago country.

"Our target is boosting the economic growth to more than 7 percent within this three years," Jokowi revealed at JIEXpo Kemayoran.

Huge subsidy, particularly on energy, has long curbed the government to finance more poor infrastructure facilities in the country.

Nevertheless, experts have been concerned that Jokowi's development program could be hampered by the House of Representatives which has been dominated by opposition coalition parties.

Indonesia is a net-oil importer country after the country exited from OPEC in 2008 following the dwindling of oil outputs caused by aging wells and lacking of fresh investment.

Jokowi also stressed to narrow current account deficit, partly by ramping up exports, adding value of exports products.

The government is scrambling to narrow widening current account deficit gap, which has widened to 4.27 percent of the GDP to 9.1 billion U.S. dollars by the second quarter this year.

The central bank expected the gap would slightly ease to 3.2 percent of the GDP by the end of this year from 3.3 percent last year, governor of the bank Agus Martowardojo has said.

But Indonesia's trade performance flipped into a deficit of 0. 31 billion U.S. dollar in August after registering a small surplus of 123.7 million U.S. dollars in July due to high imports of oil, the national statistic bureau announced this month.

The central bank, which has kept its benchmark interest rate steady at 7.5 percent since December, aims at keeping implementing a tight monetary policy by year end despite of weakening economic growth and inflation, Agus has revealed.